Does Kerry have a health problem or just a health records problem? It seems like Kerry wants to continue in the tradition of Bill Clinton, who also never fully opened his medical records. While this is a frequent early campaign jousting tool as candidates try to draw a line between their privacy and the needs of the country to ensure that their leadership isn't going to cause a worldwide crisis by dropping dead at an uncomfortable moment. Kerry has a little bit more of a problem here than even usual as his genes are at least somewhat Ashkenazi jewish and that genotype has some unusual (and thank goodness relatively rare) vulnerabilities that are fair game in the health record derby. This is a political danger that he's got to face up to as most people still think he's of irish extraction and while he hasn't lied about it for the most part, its going to come up eventually and his long-term record of being happy to let people live with a mistaken impression of his ethnicity as long as it served him politically is bound to come out.
There are pretty obvious ways of playing things unfairly here and the risk only grows as long as Kerry delays. This assumes that there is no hidden condition there that would be a problem. But we don't know that, do we? And if John F Kerry has anything to say about it, we never will.
Posted by TMLutas at April 1, 2004 11:43 AM